There’s a reason George Thorogood & the Destroyers’ discography includes more than half a dozen live albums. Their high-octane, sax-spiced, blues-rock works best in a concert setting, where audiences seem to energize Thorogood, and he interacts with them as well as he does with his guitar. The latest recorded evidence of that is on the new The Baddest Show on Earth: Greatest Hits Live.

The title is a misnomer, since Thorogood hasn’t had any hits to speak of. He broke into Billboard’s Hot 100 just once, in 1985, with a cover of Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” which made it only to No. 63—and that song isn’t even on the new CD. What is here, though, is some of Thorogood’s best-loved concert material.

The 70-minute set includes his own “Bad to the Bone” and “Born to Be Bad” and his covers of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” Elmore James’s “Madison Blues,” Hank Williams’s “Move It On Over,” and John Lee Hooker’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” the latter in a scorching, nearly 11-minute version. Also on the program are some lesser-known standouts, such as “Steppin’ Out,” a Memphis Slim instrumental, and covers of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Tail Dragger” and “Howlin’ for My Baby.” The album closes with a rhythmic, rollicking 12-and-a-half-minute cover of Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun.”  

The record’s selections were culled from eight shows around the U.S. and include seven performances from 1978–82 plus four from 2020–24. However, Thorogood’s approach hasn’t changed over the years, and the material is presented without track breaks, so you’ll feels as if you’re listening to a single concert.

While live versions of most of these songs were previously available, all but three of these specific recordings have not been released until now. Those three, incidentally, can all be found on Live in Boston 1982, a terrific double CD that clocks in at nearly two and a half hours and includes 25 songs. If you want a big dose of Thorogood & the Destroyers in concert, that should be your first purchase. But if you’re looking for a more concise survey of their live shows, you couldn’t do better than the new album. Its songs might not be hits, but as the CD title suggests, the performances are among the baddest you can find.

The album is available here.

Also Noteworthy

Samantha Fish, Paper Doll Live. Speaking of blues rockers who excel in a live setting, don’t miss the consistently thrilling Paper Doll Live, from singer, songwriter, and ace guitarist Samantha Fish. Recorded at Knoxville, Tennessee’s Bijou Theatre, the album opens with a fiery cover of the MC5’s incendiary “Kick Out the Jams.” The rest of the program includes souped-up renditions of eight of the nine songs from last year’s Grammy-nominated Paper Doll and several numbers from Fish’s other past albums, including the title cut from 2013’s Black Wind Howlin’ and R.L. Burnside’s “Poor Black Mattie,” from 2017’s Belle of the West.

Throughout, Fish’s guitar work is captivating, and her sassy vocals couldn’t be more passionate. Backup by the McCrary Sisters, a first-rate Nashville gospel group, is icing on the cake.

The album is available here.

Fruit Bats, The Landfill. We last heard from Chicago-based Eric D. Johnson, who records as Fruit Bats, on 2025’s excellent, largely solo Baby Man. Now, on the self-produced The Landfill, his 12^th and arguably best album, he’s back to working with his longtime road band, which augments his guitars, piano, synth, and lap steel with such other instruments as vibraphone, drums, glockenspiel, and bass. The CD contains 10 elegantly constructed pop/rock songs for which Johnson wrote all the words and the lion’s share of the atmospheric music. The set benefits from creative arrangements, impressionistic lyrics that stay with you after the record ends, and the singer’s distinctive tenor.

There’s a lot of reflection, not to mention melancholy, in these tunes, which contain enough references to a lost relationship to make you suspect that the lyrics might stem from real-life experience. In “That Goddamn Sun,” for example, Johnson sings, “Heard you were leaving for the country / Maybe you found a love who’s likely an improvement over me.” In “Fishin’ for a Vision,” meanwhile, he  confesses that “it’s so hard to picture living without you / But now I do,” and, in “All Wounds,” he sings, “‘Time heals all wounds’ is a thing they say / But no, I haven’t always found it to be that way / …So hard to let love in / So hard to let it go.” Then there’s “Think Aboutcha,” where he reveals that he “was gonna ask for you to come back home,” but adds that “maybe you don’t…even wanna hear my voice again.”

If lines like these are indeed drawn from Johnson’s life, he might be dealing with considerable relationship-related pain. But as records like Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks have demonstrated, such pain can be the inspiration for exceptional music.

The album is available here.

The Sensational Country Blues Wonders!, Music Sounds Better When You’re Stoned. In rock’s early years, songs that celebrated drug use tended to be subtle. People speculated about whether the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” concerned psychedelics because the lyrics seemed trippy and the initials of the title’s key words were LSD. Other songs of the period that purportedly slipped in drug references or imagery include the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” and the Association’s “Along Comes Mary.” (Numbers with more explicit references tended to be anti-drug, such as Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher,” Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done,” and Paul Revere & the Raiders’ “Kicks.”)

With marijuana now legal in multiple states and psychedelics being used medically, however, times have changed—and in the music world, nothing better demonstrates the transformation than the latest album from New Jersey–based Gary Van Miert, who performs as the Sensational Country Blues Wonders!. Van Miert doesn’t beat around the cannabis bush. He calls his latest album Music Sounds Better When You’re Stoned, which is also the name of its title cut. Other tracks include “A Mad Tea Party,” “Harsh Toke,” and “Stoners Circus.”

Like a couple of the artist’s earlier outings, this CD incorporates country-tinged rock with druggy overtones or, as a promotional blurb aptly puts it, “Think Hank Williams meets the Beatles during their psychedelic phase.” The record might sound better when you’re stoned, but it’s a fun outing regardless of what state you’re in.

The album is available here.